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The Ballad of Little Jo (1993)

Posted By: Croaker_of_The_Black_Company

Date: 5 Feb 2010 02:29:51

In the Wild West, a woman had only two choices. She could be a wife or she could be a whore… Josephine Monaghan chose to be a man.

Plot (from AMG):
The Ballad of Little Jo is based on a true story – several true stories, in fact. Suzy Amis plays demure young Josephine Monagan, who in 1866 is run out of her home town after bearing an illegitimate child. Fleeing westward, Josephine is terrified by stories of how treacherous the frontier can be for a woman alone. As a result, upon arriving in the muddy burg of Ruby City, she disguises herself as a man, going so far as to scar her face to suggest that she's been in a few scrapes. In this guise, "Little Jo" does just fine by herself for nearly 30 years! Almost as good as Suzy Amis is Bo Hopkins as gunslinger Frank Badger, Little Jo's best buddy (if only he knew….) Written and directed by Maggie Greenwald, The Ballad of Little Jo does a marvelous job conveying the people and places of its period; and, unlike Bad Girls (which was released around the same time), we aren't bludgeoned to death by feminist revisionism. Unfortunately ignored when it went out to theatres in the fall of 1993, The Ballad of Little Jo has fared rather better on video.
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Review (from AMG):
by Tom Wiener
Turning the feminist point of view askew, this film offers the premise that the only way a woman could prosper in the frontier West with any dignity was to disguise herself as a man. The fact is, given the constrictions on women at the time, this was likely the only means of prospering for a woman anywhere in America. But Little Jo, née Josephine Monaghan, has a better chance of concealing her identity on the underpopulated frontier, which also was democratically open to an entrepreneur with some talent and determination. Jo learns how to be a sheepherder from Frank Badger (Bo Hopkins), and then turns the tables on him by saving up enough to buy her own spread and flock. They manage to coexist as neighbors, if not outright pals, for the rest of her life. But her secret is discovered rather quickly by another outcast, a Chinese veteran of railroad work (David Chung), who becomes, in turn, her domestic servant and then her lover. Concealing both her identity and the affair almost overwhelms Jo, and the film is distressingly vague on the resolution of the couple's relationship. Another subplot involving a cattle baron trying to buy Jo's land is similarly unresolved. What the film is best at portraying is the isolation and terrible loneliness of life on the frontier. Writer/director Maggie Greenwald's next film, Songcatcher, also dealt with a woman venturing into a isolated culture where she wasn't welcome; in that story, the protagonist made few accommodations. In a rare lead performance, Suzy Amis is persuasive, but because of her character's understandable reticence, the real life of this party is Bo Hopkins' Frank, a man who's sure that Little Jo is some kind of peculiar fellow but is at the same time remarkably tolerant of him.
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Subtitles (from opensubtitles.org)

1990 HDTV Western DVD-Rip